Tag: webcams

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Ancient Web: DriveMeInsane Has Let Strangers Control the Lights Since 1997

In August 1997, Paul Mathis put a webcam online and gave strangers the ability to mess with his lights.

Visit DriveMeInsane

The site’s FAQ says the project began under the name Spy on Paul Mathis. Visitors could watch a live camera, turn lamps on and off, and observe the result in real time. Over the years it accumulated more cameras, controllable devices, messages, chat, audio, and other features.

The site still describes itself with refreshing accuracy: an amusing hobby with no real purpose, financial or otherwise.

Home automation as public nuisance

The current interface exposes controllable lamps and other devices directly beside the camera feed. Visitors can switch hardware, send a message to a marquee, and in some configurations hear text read by voice synthesis.

The FAQ explains that the controlled lamps use X10 and other home-automation technologies. It also addresses the obvious question: doesn’t it get irritating to have strangers turning the lights on and off?

Apparently you get used to it.

The site’s later name came from a 2002 radio appearance. During a description of the project, a DJ sarcastically asked something like, “What is this, Drive Me Insane dot com?” Mathis did not yet have a working domain for the site, so he registered it.

That origin fits perfectly.

DriveMeInsane belongs to the same early-web tradition as coffee-pot cameras and other projects where connecting an ordinary physical object to the Internet was itself enough reason to build something.

Today remote switches, cameras, smart bulbs, voice control, and web-connected appliances are mundane consumer products. In 1997, making the web visibly affect a lamp in somebody’s room felt like a demonstration of what the network could become.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many experiments like this because they preserve the moment when ordinary household objects first became Internet-accessible toys.

Most smart-home demos are boring now.

Letting strangers annoy you with yours remains funny.

Return to DriveMeInsane

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Ancient Web: Vulkaner.no Is a Hand-Built Volcano Portal from the Webcam Era

Vulkaner.no feels like the period when a useful website could simply be one person saying, “I keep following volcanoes, so here is everything I have found.”

Visit the volcano section at Vulkaner.no

The page is a dense portal into active volcanoes, recent activity, submarine volcanoes, terminology, hazards, eruption stories, photographs and volcano webcams.

One surviving version advertises 100 different cams, which immediately dates the page to a wonderful era when simply pointing a live camera at a volcano felt like a small miracle.

The subject range is broad: Surtsey decades after its eruption, Tungurahua in 1999, Guagua Pichincha, Hawaiian volcano hazards, Banda Api, Long Valley, Paricutin, Tonga, mud volcanoes and the question of what happens to a landscape after an eruption.

A portal instead of a feed

Modern information systems tend to flatten a subject into search results and social posts. Vulkaner.no is organized more like a personal research desk.

There are links outward to geological institutions and scientific sources, but also the owner’s own pages, travel material and image collections. Some sections read like reference indexes. Others preserve the experience of following eruptions over time.

That mixture is useful for internet historians because it shows how specialist hobby sites worked before centralized platforms absorbed most link discovery. The webmaster did not need to own every source. The value was in knowing which sources mattered and arranging them into a path a curious reader could follow.

For geology students, older links and photographs can also provide historical context around eruptions that were once current news. A page written around an event in 1999 eventually becomes a document about how that event was being watched at the time.

The page even announces that it was made with Macromedia Dreamweaver, which is almost a carbon-date stamp for the old web.

This site was found in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web research corpus.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

Vulkaner.no is messy in the productive way old specialist sites often were: geology, webcams, travel, pictures, links and years of accumulated curiosity all living under one roof.

Return to Vulkaner.no’s volcano portal